By Hunt Palmer
Summers breed confidence in the college football world.
Players lift weights, run sprints. Fans read and talk. No one loses a game, so optimism has a way of emerging. The energy in Baton Rouge has been no different. Many believe this LSU team should be Brian Kelly’s best. Kelly himself believes that.
“This is the best roster we’ve put together,” Kelly told the media at the SEC Spring Meetings.
Part of that roster is fifth-year signal caller Garrett Nussmeier who took his turn in front of the mic at The Manning Passing Academy over the weekend.
“He’s not lying,” Nussmeier said of Kelly’s assertion. “It’s definitely the most talented roster that I’ve been a part of at LSU. It’s the closest team that I’ve been a part of at LSU from top to bottom. It’s very exciting. Like I said earlier, there’s a lot of expectations on us. We accept those expectations. Not only is there an expectation for us from the outside, but there’s an expectation for us from within.”
Nussmeier mentioned that he’s found a little bit of time for golf this summer, but that’s been about the extent of his time away from the football facility.
“There hasn’t been much relaxing this offseason,” Nussmeier said. “We’re on full go. We obviously know the expectation for us. And I think the best part about our team is that we’ve risen to those expectations. People say, ‘pressure is a privilege’, and I think we’ve attacked with that type of mindset every single day.”
LSU added 18 transfers to the roster for the spring and summer. Coupled with 23 freshmen, better than 40 new faces will strap on the helmets for fall camp in a month’s time.
Creating togetherness with so much turnover can be a challenge.
“In this new era of college football, you have transfers and things like that,” Nussmeier said. “The most important thing we’ve underlined is that we have to be close. We have to create a chemistry. I think we’ve done an unbelievable job with that. You see the videos of us playing in the pool at Coach Kelly’s house…doing different things on our own time. Just spending time around each other as much as we can, getting those transfers as comfortable as we can. Trying to build that chemistry.”
Kelly’s tenure has been highlighted by an SEC Western Division title in 2022 and a Heisman Trophy in 2023, but LSU has not won the SEC nor played for a national title over the course of four seasons.
Part of the problem is that the Tigers continue to trip out of the starting gate.
LSU enters the 2025 season having lost five consecutive season-openers including all three of Kelly’s.
“Obviously, we’re aware of the fact that we’ve lost the last five openers,” Nussmeier said. “It’s affected us. I think, at a place like LSU, we have expectations every year of playing for a national championship, of playing for an SEC championship. I think in the past we may have gotten lost in looking at that too early. I think that switch into the mindset of., ‘hey, we’re starting 1-0,’ I think it’s been huge for us, and I think it’s created a different level of intensity throughout offensive training.”
Kelly has spoken publicly about signage displayed in the facility about the season opener with Clemson. The entire program is singularly focused on that one game.
Dabo Sweeney’s Tigers made the College Football Playoff a season ago and return quarterback Cade Klubnik and multiple projected first round picks on defense.
Memorial Stadium’s 81,500 capacity will be challenged for the 7:30pm local kickoff on Labor Day weekend. Clemson is 70-5 at home since 2014 and won 40 games in a row in its version of Death Valley from 2016 to 2022.
“It’s going to be loud,” Nussmeier said. “It’s going to be a very intense environment. It’s something that we welcome. It’s something that we invite. It’s a great opportunity. You come to LSU to play in environments like that. You get to play in a night game against another top ranked team in prime time. They’ve got a lot of players that are going to play for a long time, and so do we. It’s going to be a dogfight, and we’ve attacked every day with that in mind, just to go 1-0.”
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